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- English Men of Letters: Coleridge - 20/33 -

London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_
articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At
Bristol again as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health
and embarrassment--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.

[1810-1816.]

The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is
difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and
circumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of
information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that
even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may
exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply
the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become
Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and
acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly
silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear
of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest
importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances
would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next
half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most
intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for
but little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of
this period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during
its continuance were to be given to the world.

Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's
correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,--
scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness
visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves
involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop
[1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says
that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life."
The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy
home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to
hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain
enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as
to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the
estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some
violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly
precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping
and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says
that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with
Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as
though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the
"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment
of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which
Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years
afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an
income of L1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There
is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally
enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort
included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship
the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all
Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a
double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate
preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another
perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all
men who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often
displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any
kind whatever.

Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810
Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some
months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some
difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether
it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has,
admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal,"
referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other,
towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811,
Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a
companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and
Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was
residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to
the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on
this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane
Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday,
18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on
Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry and
their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works
of later English poets, those of the living included. After an
introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on
its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the
prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and
explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists,
as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a
critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery,
management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his
dramas--in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a
dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors,
Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavour
to determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to
him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to
his genius."

A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in
September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite
journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then
the proprietor of the _Courier_. It was not, however, his first
connection with that journal. He had already published at least one
piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the
_Friend_ was still in existence, he had contributed to it a
series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against their
French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of
his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that
the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them,
we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of
movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic
days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel
which he institutes between the struggle of the Low Countries against
their tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurping
conqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness.
Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame of
hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowed
in his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he
speaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes,
we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of "popular
assembly," have some of their old magic for him still. The following
passage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, before
that modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into
the Xerxes of the Empire.

"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch
republic,--the same mighty power is no less at work in the present
struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations
of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere
outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A
power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity
in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its
affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most
discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish
vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and
in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an
individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole
nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it
exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the
countrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the
answer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will,
steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against brute
force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature,
brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the
rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country."

And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of his
earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the
calmer eloquence of his later manner:--

"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts,
and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very
persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them
to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those
forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon
a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful
part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us,
from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger
than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historic
muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her
appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence
the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the
information of these truths which they themselves first learned from
the surer oracle of their own reason."

But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did
not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish
insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious
series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have
sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to
do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that
Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and
restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers--was
an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his
thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with
confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is
sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final
migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour.
But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the
_Courier_ in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles
of a dozen years before in the _Morning Post_ but fall sensibly
short of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has just
been made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of
style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to
show a change in Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not in
the very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much
more of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier
contributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to write
a mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or
the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the
political situation, as his wont had been, _au large_; and in
place of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in
the great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that
sort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our
contemporary, the _Morning Chronicle_," which had less attraction,
it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day than
for the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course,
it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extends
from September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appears
to have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in the
intermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strong
opposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in the